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E-commerce refers to conducting business over the internet, with websites as the primary platform. E-commerce hosting provides specialized services for merchants’ needs, including email, databases, shopping carts, and payment systems. E-commerce hosts offer various support options and packages with different features, prices, and reliability guarantees.
E-commerce is short for “electronic commerce” and primarily refers to the practice of conducting business over the Internet. Merchants who conduct e-commerce may be referred to as etailers or merchants, and the place from which they do business is usually a website, rather than a storefront. Like all websites, these e-commerce sites need hosting – the servers, software and features to run an internet business. Since ecommerce websites have special needs that don’t arise for people with personal websites, the specialized designation of ecommerce hosting arose to specify those web hosting companies that specialize in providing the services they need e-commerce.
Since ecommerce involves businesses across a wide selection of industries and aims to achieve a wide variety of purposes, ecommerce hosting generally offers many more solutions than any single business need. E-commerce can be used to sell services, digital downloads, products that are shipped, licenses to use software online, and a growing number of other purposes. Some businesses combine a storefront with an online presence and need to integrate the two. Each of these particular ways of conducting business online has different ecommerce hosting needs.
Despite the differences, there are some basic applications that nearly every merchant requires. These include email, databases, a shopping cart program, FTP and a payment system. Other applications that some sites may use and others may not include blogs, live chat applications, and a website builder.
All ecommerce hosts provide support, but the way, means, and quality of support can differ greatly. The types of support offered can include a knowledge base, a support forum, live chat, and telephone support. The most comprehensive support includes 24/7 telephone support, as well as a knowledge base that includes video demos of the most common tasks and step-by-step articles.
Ecommerce hosting providers are plentiful. The packages they offer differ in price and in the specific applications and amounts of their offers. Key differences include the operating system of their servers, the number and type of databases they offer, bandwidth and disk storage limits, the version of PHP and Perl they are using, multimedia features, and availability of various script plug-ins which could come in handy when merchants want to create message forums, mailing lists, polls, image galleries, etc. Specific ecommerce features that may or may not be offered include password protected directories, SSL Secure Servers, and a variety of shopping cart programs.
Other concerns with ecommerce hosting are redundancy and reliability. Redundancy refers to the duplication of materials such as backups. Reliability refers to the “uptime” maintenance of the network, the security and efficiency of the host in resolving any problems that arise. Some ecommerce hosts have an uptime guarantee.
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